US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Venezuelan migrants in Colombia on Sunday as he wrapped up a four-nation tour of South America aimed at pressuring Venezuela's socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.
The migrant centre has been the first stop for some 3.4 million Venezuelans who have fled hyperinflation, severe shortages of food and medicine, and political upheaval in their homeland.
Pompeo described a "very moving" encounter with a Venezuelan mother named Geraldine who crossed into Colombia and was torn about abandoning her country even as she had to scavenge for diapers, medicine and other basic goods she could no longer find in Venezuela.
Mimicking President Ronald Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" speech in Berlin at the end of the Cold War, Pompeo urged Maduro to lift a military blockade preventing the entry of tons of humanitarian aid that has sat for months on Venezuela's borders with Colombia, Brazil and the Dutch Caribbean.
"Mr. Maduro, open these bridges, open these borders. You can end this today," Pompeo said. "I hope you will care now when you see the horror, when you see the tragedy, to change your ways and to leave your country."
The US was the first of more than now 50 nations that in January recognised Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaid when he declared himself his country's interim president.
The opposition, with the support of the US and other countries, claimed Maduro's re-election last year to be illegitimate because leading critics were barred from running.
But significant popular support for Guaid at home hasn't loosened Maduro's grip on power, and the embattled leader continues to enjoy the support of the armed forces, the traditional arbiter of political disputes in Venezuela.
Authorities in Venezuela have accused Washington of plotting Maduro's overthrow and even blamed it for a failure of the electrical grid last month that left much of the country without power for days. On Sunday, a top official ridiculed Pompeo's visit to the border.
"Confirmed: Washington and Bogota ratify Cucuta as the regular stage for their most decadent and cheap spectacles," Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said in a message on Twitter.
"In the meantime, the abandoned people of Cucuta continue to live off the Venezuelan economy." The US has provided almost USD 275 million in aid to Colombia, Peru and other South American allies to absorb the flood of migrants from Venezuela.
When pressed by a reporter on whether the generosity shown Venezuelans fleeing Maduro is in conflict with the Trump administration's hostile policies toward migrants on the southern US border, Pompeo called the comparison "ludicrous." "People are starving because Nicolas Maduro is denying food that is sitting here. This is horrific. There is nothing else like this," Pompeo said while flying back to Washington.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)